Offshore operations - maximum flying hours

[Sir Niall Dementia]

I left off-shore in 1999 when we were all knocking hard on the rolling 800 hours in 365 days. Double Bogeys 5-6 hours per day was the norm then, but in the early 1990's I did an overseas contract, local registered aircraft, local rules,local licenses, when I logged 740 hours in six months. That was in S61s (no aircon, (well less than a thousand miles north of the equator) concrete seats, no active headsets and pretty much no idea of performance or any form of local legal protection and some really nice local guys in the left seat. When our team got back the company had to leave us off the roster for a couple of months on full pay to get us back legal under home rules.

Now I average 300-350 per year, but it feels far more tiring (although I am a lot older) flying SPIFR corporate around northern Europe and the UK. There is very little advance notice of what a task will be and a lot of variables in the tasking, that takes a lot of the drudgery of off-shore away and it was the drudgery of 5-6 hours (on a rare occasion 8 hours) in an immersion suit that I found most fatiguing.

A lot of ops personnel don't realise that off-shore the need to be right at the very top of your game comes on departure and arrival and at any time you are shuttling. That sudden change from relaxed, proffesional cockpit in the cruise to high levels of concentration in busy airspace with weather at minima was the point of a study into pilot fatigue many years ago and is one of the reasons why UK FTLs are as stringent as they are, also while bean counters don't understand flying, crewing will always be at bare minimum, and the bean counters will continue to have a huge impact on an area they don't understand.

As an aside the company I worked for off-shore brought in some management consultants. They were priceless, one asked why we flew twins when surely singles were more economical, another came to me one day after I had flown two trips to the Fulmar in a 332 and stated that a S61 flight was needed, there were no 61 pilots available, but as I was 61 rated I should fly it (I hadn't sat in one for three years) This was a year into their management study and input, he proved in that year he had learned the square root of sod all.

SND